Today begins a month-long sojourn
in the book of Genesis, with one Gospel break in the middle; we’ll be dipping
first into the Abraham narrative arc and then the Jacob cycle. Today's lesson begins in the middle of it all
so it's a good that we catch up a little, and though it can be argued that,
like everything else, it begins “in the beginning,” we'll start a bit later,
where Abraham -- who is still called Abram -- hears God's call: “Go from your country Haran and your kindred
and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a
great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will
be a blessing ... [so that] in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him ...” He’s told to leave the only home he knows,
the only family he knows, and set out to God knows where ... Literally, only God
knows, and God's not telling
Abram. But he goes anyway.
And this is why theologian Robert
Hamerton-Kelly calls the Abram/Abraham narrative a story about faith: Abram had
faith that God wouldn't let him down, that God would do right by Abram, that it
all wasn't some big, divine joke, look what that idiot has done, he thought I
was serious. And that wasn’t the only thing he had faith in, he had faith in a
promise: that God would make of him a great nation, which God later elaborated
by taking him outside and showing him the night sky, and saying “Look toward
heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them... So shall your
descendants be.” And he believed the
Lord, our narrator says, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Now, let's get something
straight: this isn't just any promise, like the promise of a thunderstorm later
this week, or the promise in a pretty girl's smile ... This is The Promise, the
capital-T-the and capital-P-promise promise.
It's central to the Jewish tradition, and pretty darn important in ours
as well ... This is The Promise that is elaborated upon and echoed and
theologized about in the entire rest of the Bible, the promise that we
Christians believe we have grafted into, as Paul would put it, through our Lord
Jesus Christ.
And one way to read the stories
in Genesis are as tales of repeated threats
to the promise, followed by the repeated overcoming
of those threats, and the first one happens shortly after Abram sets out from
Haran. A famine strikes the Middle East,
and Abram and Sarai head south to Egypt where Abram, to preserve his own hide,
tells the Pharaoh's people that Sarai is his sister, and they, in turn, tell
the Pharaoh how beautiful she is, and he, in turn, takes her into his
household, and this might have been the end of The Promise right then and there
except for the fact that God inflicts great plagues upon Pharaoh -- innocent
though he is -- and so Pharaoh, who acts with more integrity and morals than
Abram, even though he is not of the "chosen people", gives her back and
runs them out of town on a rail, saying "Why didn't you TELL me she was
your wife?"
Well, could it be that “Father
Abraham,” patriarch of both the Jews and the Muslims, is a snivelling little
weasel, willing to give away his wife’s, ah . . . virtue to save himself? Anyway, in our passage, the promise is imperilled
once again, this time by Abraham's and Sarah's extreme old age -- the way our
narrator puts it is that Sarah had ceased to be
after the manner of women, which, if you think about it, is a crummy thing
to say, as if the only thing that makes Sarah a woman is her ability to have
children, but in that culture, in that time, that's what women were considered
to be: brood mares, whose worth was only to produce an heir, and of course, to
step and fetch it for her husband, which, now that I think of it, might explain
why he felt he could sell his wife’s favors to the highest bidder: if Sarah was
his property, then so was her sexuality.
Now. If the promise is threatened by a simple
biological fact, like old age, it's also threatened by a certain complacency on
the part of the man of the tent. Abraham
has got to be feeling pretty fat and sassy ... In the years since leaving
Haran, He'd done quite well for himself, thank you very much, and he could
afford to while away the hot part of the day lounging in the shade on his front
porch. And though it's not that he
doesn't have faith in God, you understand, he still believes that Sarah will
provide him an heir, even though he did ROFL (that's roll on the floor laughing
for you non-techies) when God promised it the last time, but let’s just say he feels more secure since he
had his hedged by his sleeping with Hagar and producing Ishmael, who was a
fine, strapping boy, perfectly suitable to be his back-up heir. Just in case, you understand.
But if Abraham is complacent,
Sarah has a full-fledged case of the ennui's as she sits there stewing in the
half-dark of the tent, thinking bitter thoughts about what a mistake it had
been giving the old goat her slave in the first
place, how much of a nothing she felt at being unable to give him an heir,
because the thing about societal expectations, about social ostracism of
"the other," is that the victims tend to buy into the nastiness as
well, and she more than half-believed Hagar when she called her worthless, just
as she more than half-believed the sneers and furtive whispers of the other
women.
So Abraham is feeling expansive
and Sarah a mite bitter when the visitors show up, all dusty and sweaty from
the road, and Abraham does what he’s supposed to: he orders Sarah to make bread, tells a slave
to ready the fatted calf, and invites them to stay for supper. And this is to be expected in the ancient
Middle East honor-shame culture, where honor and shame were accrued according
to what you did, because one of the biggest honor-producers was hospitality,
and conversely, one of the biggest shame-bringers was its opposite—not being hospitable. And so, in the
ancient Middle East, hospitality was raised to an art-form, because nobody
wanted to accrue shame.
Of course, there was a reason
hospitality was so important to a culture of wandering desert nomads ... in that
harsh environment, it was a long way between water sources, between wells, and
when a traveller got to one, they
were inevitably controlled by wealthy land-owners (like Abraham) and guarded by
their men. And so a tradition of hospitality developed partly as a mechanism for
maximizing the chances of everybody's survival, because after all: tomorrow it
may be you who is in need of food and water.
It was kind of like the original version of pay it forward.
So Abraham scurries around to
prepare a repast, ordering Sarah and the slaves to do the work, then stands off
to one side to watch them eat. And it is
at this point that things get a little bit ... strange. The visitors ask “where is your wife Sarah?”
and on the outside, Abraham is all cool nonchalant, saying “There ... In the
tent,” but inside he's thinking “How do they know the name of my wife? I've never seen them before in my life.” And then one of them makes a promise: “I will
surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son,” and is
it then that Abraham gets who it is he’s
talking to? Did he tumble to the big,
fat hint? Because who but the Lord can
promise a child? Who but God can open a
womb?
Meanwhile, back in the tent,
where there are no visitors, and it's hot as the gates of Sheol from all the
sun beating down on the skins all day, Sarah has heard it all. And even though she knows that something
extraordinary is going on, that they aren't in Kansas any more, such is her
state of mind that she sloughs off the whole thing: “After I have grown old,
and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?”
And she laughs a quiet little laugh—no more than a chuckle, really—at
the absurdity of it all.
And now the jig is up, and the
narrator gives up all pretence and calls their visitor by name, it’s the Lord,
of course, who asks Abraham: “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, 'Shall I indeed
bear a child, now that I am old?' Is
anything too wonderful for the LORD?” And maybe it’s my imagination, but I
detect a little peevishness when God says: “At the set time I will return to
you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.”
Note that even then, our narrator
has God talking to Abraham, not Sarah, but it’s Sarah who talks back: “I did
not laugh,” she says, and finally, God talks to Sarah herself: “Yes you did
laugh,” and I always get this irrational thought when I read this, that if
Sarah had said “No I didn’t,” God would’ve come back with “Oh, yes you did!” and they would’ve gone round and
round like children, and maybe it would’ve been that way, too, but Sarah takes
the better part of valor and shuts up.
But I imagine she doesn’t stop
thinking . . . I certainly wouldn’t have . . . after all the times she’s been
cut out of the conversation, all the times God has reiterated the promise to
Abraham, God finally talks directly to her, and it’s a rebuke. And what was God rebuking her for? A lack of faith:
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord, God had asked, and Sarah had shown
that she didn’t buy it.
And so we’re back to the matter
of faith, as Robert Hamerton-Kelly pointed out: faith that God will do as he
had promised, faith that indeed, nothing is too wonderful for the Lord, but
really: can you blame Sarah for it? I
can’t . . . she had led a hard life, full of sorrow and disappointment, caught
up in a patriarchal system that made it seem perfectly all right for her
husband to give her away like a prize sheep, caught up in a system that makes
her believe she’s worth nothing more, living her 90 years as a part of that
system, so that she herself believed she was nothing more than chattel . . .
and yet, the Lord had spoken to her,
even though it was a rebuke, God had talked directly to her, and that must’ve given
her hope, and maybe just a tad more faith.
When we talk about faith, we
often get all Presbyterian, we often feel the need to define it and dissect it
as if it’s an insect under glass. We say
that faith is more than belief, that it is, in the words of the author of
Hebrews, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things
not seen,” and worry that and other definitions to death . . . in fact, I think
I’ve preached a sermon like that a time or two.
But I think that, in the end, it
is stories that teach us the best, about things like faith and hope and love. Because faith is a living, breathing thing,
and I don’t believe that one size fits all, that it is expressed differently in
each and every one of us. As
Hamerton-Kelly puts it “Definitions freeze human experience like specimens in
the scientist’s bottle, while stories flow like life itself, twisting and
turning, like life itself.” Humans learn
through stories, from the earliest days of our childhood, we listen to them and
absorb them in their endless variety.
Whatever our religion means by faith will emerge in the twists and turns
of living, both our living and those of the saints who have gone before.
So, friends, let’s take some time
to tell the stories of those imperfect saints, like Abraham and Sarah and Jacob
and Isaac, and let faith seep into us, like water into thirsty soil, and let it
produce within us a deep gladness, a deep hope in our lives that the answer to
God’s question on that long ago day, the answer to “is anything too wonderful
for the Lord?” is a resounding, joyful “No!”
Amen.
